


Historian and Man

by misura



Category: Alex Benedict - Jack McDevitt
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 14:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9660347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: Hugh Scott, on Sim'sMan and Olympian.





	

_Perhaps we expect too much of our heroes._

Hugh Scott remembered the first time he had read _Man and Olympian_. Spotting the name of the author, he'd experienced a certain amount of anticipation. Nothing so grand as actual excitement, of course - there were limits even to the magic a name like Christopher Sim's might work on the mind of the average schoolchild. Still, here, at last, had seemed to be one book that might not be dull, written by a genuine hero.

In all fairness, it might have helped that authors like Shakespeare and Austen were far more easily consumed as scenarios than as actual books. The official expectation was that one would read the original, unenhanced text, but in hindsight, Hugh rather assumed that his teacher had known perfectly well that the majority of kids would never experience Shakespeare's classics as anything other than an excuse to be exposed to the sort of violence their parents ordinarily would never approve of.

While Christopher Sim had inspired his fair share of scenarios, without exception, they focused on the life of the man himself, rather than his book, which was non-fiction, anyway.

In some cases, like Van Greenberg's _Radiance_ , that hadn't stopped the publishers, but where _Radiance_ focused on the events of a single year in a single city, _Man and Olympian_ 's scope was considerably wider.

And so, year after year, schoolchildren everywhere experienced the bitter disappointment of discovering that the hero of their favorite dramadventure had written a book that weighed a ton and was not particularly fun.

For himself, Hugh knew that the disappointment hadn't tempered his enjoyment of the classic _Sim's Last Stand_ (which did not, in fact, deal with the battle at Rigel, the general public preferring for their entertainment to have a happy ending).

Along with countless others, from the age of thirteen onwards, Hugh had been Sim's weapons officer, his (non-treasonous, it went without saying) navigator and his engineer. He'd played chess with or against Sim, attended speeches by Sim's brother, and gone on all sorts of missions the success of which always was, in some nebulous manner, of vital importance to the Resistance, slowly working his way up to a personal commendation from the man himself.

In a way, Hugh supposed, it was all rather silly. Fun, though. Some people complained about how commercial the whole thing had become, but Hugh had never been very sympathetic to that particular point of view.

Christopher Sim had been dead for a long time. As far as Hugh and the majority of mankind was concerned, he belonged to everyone. If someone wanted to make yet another remake starring the latest hot young actor, or respin one of Sim's famous battles, where was the harm?

_Perhaps we should accept that there are no such people as heroes._

Hugh had returned to _Man and Olympian_ later than most of his friends. He'd been a bit bemused, to find that nearly all of them had reread the great man's opus magnus years before Hugh himself had even begun to think about it.

He supposed that part of the reason was that he'd never become a family man. He didn't have any kids who'd get assigned the same books he had, no stimulus to give the thing another go in order to be able to show off for his youngsters.

There'd been times when he'd considered it. Once or twice, he had almost been sure that he'd finally found the right person to settle down with for good, start a family. Then something would come up, and the moment would pass.

He didn't mind, really. He was still young, and there was plenty of time for that sort of thing. He was happy to wait for the perfect person, the perfect moment. Being single meant he could move when he wanted to move, which made it easier to find a job that was exactly what he wanted, rather than one that would merely pay the bills and not bore him to death.

Rereading _Man and Olympian_ helped him with that, in a way. It reminded him of what was important, of the dreams he'd had as a boy. Not all of them had been very realistic, and some of them, he'd simply outgrown, but when the mission with the _Tenandrome_ had come up, it had seemed ideal. He hadn't hesitated for a moment.

He wished now that he had. It wouldn't have taken much. A few days of telling himself that he needed to think about it, followed by a hesitant call. Someone telling himself that alas, they had no need of someone in his field at the moment.

He hadn't known what they would find, of course. Nobody had known.

 _Let's face it: if someone had told you that coming along meant that you'd find out the truth about Christopher Sim and the fate of the_ Corsarius _, would you really have stayed away?_

You'd think that it wouldn't matter so much. True, the Mutes were still out there, but so what? Historians made new discoveries. History got revised and rewritten all the time.

Hugh tried to tell himself that a part of it was sympathy. That what he felt standing here wasn't just disappointment and a sense of betrayal, but that he was also imagining what Sim must have felt.

It couldn't have been pleasant, to know you'd been exiled to some planet where nobody would ever be able to find you. Hugh wondered if Sim had regretted his choices. The author of _Man and Olympian_ had sounded secure in his convictions, free from any weakness or doubt.

As an adult, Hugh had admired that. The book had swept him away. Other books, lesser authors, they left you with questions. They left it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Hugh didn't mind being told to figure things out for himself. He even enjoyed it. Still, when it came to _Man and Olympian_ , he hadn't been able to resist. Sim's voice was too compelling, his arguments sharp and well-crafted. You didn't put down _Man and Olympian_ with any doubts or questions.

It was hard to reconcile that Sim with the one who'd left his words carved in the rock here, the one who hadn't died a hero's death and with that death bought the Resistance's ultimate victory.

To discover that, in the end, even heroes were human; man, rather than Olympian.

Hugh wondered if Sim had died here, if somewhere on this planet, they would find a grave. He wasn't sure if it would be worth the effort to search. What were they going to do, put a monument on it?

'Here lies Christopher Sim, who ran away from his last fight.'

Who would ever come here, anyway? Once the truth became known, who would wish to pay their respects to the one-time hero of the Resistance? Who would honor him for the battles he _had_ fought, and fought well? Look at Talino, whose name was still synonymous with that of spineless coward.

Who would read _Man and Olympian_ and feel like they were in the presence of greatness?

And yet, what was the alternative? To preserve a lie. To allow future generations to grow up with the legend of Christopher Sim, hero of the Resistance, the man who had never doubted or flinched from doing what he knew was right. To let people continue to be inspired by what they thought was history.

Put like that, Hugh didn't think that it was a real choice at all.


End file.
